wingman23's Activity

We all have locks on our doors and windows but people break into property all the time. so does that mean we shouldn't bother having locks on our doors knowing that there are people dedicated to getting past those locks if they want, we all live with a false sense of security when we lock our doors but some defence is better than non at all.. makes us feel safer and for most people those locks work fine.

Seems a simple enough concept to me making the profiles private, its nothing new, its been around for years.. people are over thinking this with making avatars private and breaking content discovery, its non of those things, not for me anyway.

OH and its not meant to be compulsory, its meant to be an option for those that want it. :thumbsup:

With respect Charles, this is sooo confusing and sounds like nonsense... if he is that interesting, and im sure Matt is, then im sure he is worth clicking a button that requests to be his friend. I really dont think people are that fickle as to come across a private profile with a button to click to request a friendship as so hard and disorientating that the new member just ups and leaves without a trace never to return...im not being rude but that's nonsense.

Its almost like IPS arent getting it and for some reason are making it out to be some sort of community breaker, when in fact its the opposite, a person is more likely to leave your site if they dont feel their privacy is under control, and some people want more privacy than others depending again what type of community you run...

i just dont get why this has got so complicated. its not rocket science, well making it work is but the idea is simple enough

just make a button in the settings that a member can choose to turn on if they want friends only to see their profile...., make some fields like skype a sort of private 2 settings that members can pick and choose which members can place into that category so only friends in private 2 settings can see these contact details

leave the posts alone, they dont need to be private (non discoverable), we have private forums already for posts we dont want for general public viewing..

If a person thinks another person is interesting and wants to see more then whats so hard about clicking a button that says "request to be friend".. :sweat: click a button. oh nooo much too hard that :devil:

people are making this more complicated and convoluted than it needs to be, but then, thats what people do i suppose.... :sorcerer:

seems a simple matter of what its like for guest trying to view profiles. they get a "sorry but non members cant view profiles ".. Just take it a step further and make it so a member who tries to view someones profile, get the message.

"sorry you are not a friend of this user who requests only friends can view their profile..." Request to be their friend " also helps interactions too between members

I*ve had this before on some community or forum script i was using, cant for the life of me remember which it was though,

For me it doesn't have to be anything too restrictive, like blocking you from seeing posts of non friends or their avatars or signatures, after all these are on the whole public forums, i have private forums set up for more sensitive stuff which guests and members under a certain post count dont even know are there..

No, this is about the viewing of profile pages on the whole. members can if they want put all sorts of information on there. skpe, msn and so on. which is all built in to profiles already and we have a choice if its a private field (only admins can see it) or not.. but guess what, nobody is ever going to provide such details when they cant pick and choose who sees their information. some people dont even like putting their location in open view...

I know this is pushing it a bit but ideally there should be Private 1 and private 2 settings...

Private 1 would allow members to befriend someone and be able to choose what info is in private 1 settings... (maybe a website url, age ,location) something along those lines

private 2 (and this happens a lot on my board) members know each other for a while and get to feel trust, private 2 should have information shown such as skype, email and the like, Members should be allowed to put private one friends into private 2 friendship when they think its appropriate..

lol there speaks somebody with not much experience of social network sites,, ive been at this a long time, tried them all from ning to dolphin and on the whole they are (being polite) "rubbish and look like amateur hour" i honestly believe this is the best community software there is, its just that it needs a few basic addition, perhaps things that IPS dont feel the need for on this site, like profile privacy, so it might not occur to them that its needed in some communities.
I find specially with the profile customizations that members do feel that part of the site is their own little space that they can put as much information about themselves that they want to.
The profiles dont get utilized like they should because of the lack of control that members feel they have over their little page. If you are going to give them all an individual space they can put what they want about themselves, then why not give them a key to their own front door, it feels logical to me.

lets throw something into the arena here.. software developers and their ideas and the source of those ideas for improving each version, now looking at the updates for 4, ips are very clever very good at going at the nitty gritty coding for this and coding for that.. all the power to them, but shouldn't the ideas come from feedback from its users too, the people who are out there in the field using it, listening to their members and what they would like too.

This is why this is called the feedback section and i see more for this profile privacy than against it, and some smart cookie will see the need for it so make a hook and probably make a fortune.

Now this isn't free software is it, we pay enough i feel already without having to go to hooks for essential and some would say "basic" workings of a software like this, so feedback from its paying clients should be important, important enough to maybe listen a bit and not just go

"We have no plans for this"

Considering the magic IPS pulls off, surely this isn't all that hard to implement. Is it? :cool:

I do love this software which is why I've had nothing else for years but it does need to become more versatile for all the different reasons people use the software for. Like I said before, we all run different communities with different sets of members. Some want an open space and some want completely private. The problems start though when you want an open space with bits locked off. It is important as I just found out a few weeks ago.

I have a site with around 90% of women! I recently got a male member who only joined to stalk the women! cruising around the profile pages, reading the info then messaging the selected more vulnerable ones. This one member is apparently doing it on lots of sites like mine and the police have called him a very dangerous individual.
He got his hooks into one female member who discovered he was into some sort of sex ring, she was raped by this member and is now living in fear and having to move area while the police gather evidence to prosecute.

How different this could have all turned out for want of profile privacy and only friends viewing..

So no, for some, it's not a small thing and exactly why Facebook are forced to do it.

There really is no good argument against not having profile privacy because what it really comes down to is freedom of choice for an individual user. It might seem silly to some, but people have to respect we all run different communities, a football fan site for instance might not need it, but a site that deals with vulnerable people and I for some part am one of those sites in places, I know my members would love that choice, it might be a false sense of security to some, but thats not the point, if it makes our members feel better, safer, more secure, or just simply given the choice to feel they have control over their own personal site space, then what does it matter what we as Admins think.
Are we here to stroke our own ego or to do the best we can by our member base.

Just wondering if there is any chance of this being implemented. I know we knocked this subject about ages ago but still think its important to address in the light of this modernization of the software.

Its all about giving members a choice, even a simple one, (do i want non friends to be able to see my profile page).

Even the " its good to share everything, privacy sucks" facebook, allows this option..

Any hope at all for this very important feature being built in this time :thumbsup:

I really dont know why people are making all this fuss over a completion date, im as excited as the next person over this revamp but the one thing i dont want to happen is IPS feel pressurized to release something that isn't ready and we end up like Vbulletin, a complete nightmare.

Its hard enough as it is, specially if you have a custom skin and third party apps that will probably break, so we need the core of the site to work and work well from the get go. that to my mind is worth waiting for, Its not like we are running some crappy software, waiting to be upgraded to something good.. Its good already, so whats the rush.

yes I agree, I do wish when somebody comments in the gallery that there was at least some way for that comment to be seen on the main area of the community just like with the download app. you can comment in the gallery all day but if nobody goes in to check it out on the off chance, nobody would ever know and it just seems separate from the rest of the community. there really shouldn't be a sense of separation, not with an app that is supposed to be part of this new suit idea. but unfortunately there is..

is this still up and running because I've just pressed to activate this in my admin, only to get an error telling me my community. isn't compatible and I need to be running 3.4.4, which of course I am running the latest version, so don't know whats up with that.

this is very exciting news to hear about this version 4 but after reading through this thread there is a lot of talk about code and skins and core framework... ect ect ect...

Im not a coder or a developer so i dont much care about all that as most of the users dont either, so what i want to know when everybody is done showing off how clever they are, is what goodies will there be for people who actually sit there and post on our sites..
A lot of the useful stuff we need are actually third party addons, it would be nice to have them out of the box, things like profile privacy , maybe something where members can send gifts to each other like on those ning sites, stuff that the users will enjoy and will keep them coming back.